There was treason enough here to forfeit a hundred heads, had they grown on laic shoulders. But, as far as regarded the final penalty of the law, their ecclesiastical character proved a shield to the cardinal and his associate. The king desired the pope to nominate apostolical commissioners to try the criminals; the pope, on the other hand, contended that they must be judged by the consistory, and that the decision of their fate must be left to him. A long negotiation ensued between the spiritual and temporal sovereigns, and, as neither would concede, the offenders were never brought to trial at all. It cannot, however, be said that the cardinal and the bishop escaped unscarred. If Louis could not take their lives, he could at least render their lives a burthen, and this was a power which he was not backward in exercising. In the province of Touraine, between twenty and thirty miles to the southward of Tours, stood the castle of Loches, one of the sepulchres in which Louis buried his living victims. It was there that, at a later period, Ludovico Sforza lingered out the last years of his existence. Loches was well provided with oubliettes, dungeons, chains of enormous weight, facetiously called the king’s little daughters, iron cages, and all other means of torturing the body and mind. Thither Balue was sent, and there he passed eleven lonely years, in an iron cage, which was only eight feet square. His fate resembled that of Perillus—for to the cardinal himself is attributed the invention of these cages. Perhaps the only praise which he ever deserved was gained at the castle of Loches; the praise of having preserved his courage unshaken throughout the whole of his tedious captivity. Balue was released in 1480, went to Rome, where he was received with open arms, was sent as legate to France, and died, in 1491, bishop of Albano, and legate of the March of Ancona. His confederate, d’Haraucourt, was still more severely punished. The Bastile was his place of confinement, and there a cage, of unusual strength, was constructed in one of the towers, expressly for his abode. The cage was formed of massy beams, bolted together with iron, occupied nineteen carpenters for twenty days in framing it, and was so heavy, that the vault, which was to support it, was obliged to be rebuilt in a more substantial manner. Within its narrow and gloomy limits, d’Haraucourt was immured for no less than fifteen years. It was not till after the death of Louis the eleventh, that the prisoner was set at liberty. He died, at a very advanced age, in the year 1500.